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The Cat and the HatAnd the Evolution of Code
 
Sean Pitman M.D.© July 2003
A man walks into a store and tells the clerk, “I’m looking to buy a hat.” The clerksays, “We are all out of hats, but I do have a cat that I will sell to you at a good price.”The man tells the clerk, “Close enough. I’ll take it.”This is just silly - right? A cat is nothing like a hat despite the fact that the words lookand sound similar. The point is, words are just arbitrary symbolic representations of ideas. The letters or symbols in a word mean nothing unless they are assigned ameaning by an outside source (like a dictionary or a codebook). Because of thearbitrary nature of language any symbol or group of symbols can be assigned anydefinition, as long as it is agreed upon or understood by those who wish to use symbolsto communicate ideas. In this way, some very similar ideas can be represented by verydifferent looking words or some very different ideas can be represented by some verysimilar looking and sounding words. For example, the words “Admire” and “Esteem”have very similar meanings, but look nothing like each other. The words “Vacation” and“Vocation” look and sound very similar, but have very different meanings. Why?Because of the arbitrary nature of language. All languages are arbitrary in that written
 
or spoken symbols (or other symbols such as are used in sign language) are given their meaning and this meaning is independent of and greater than the symbols themselves.Symbolic languages are not just limited to human communication. Every living thinguses symbolic language to communicate information. How? In the form of geneticwords written in the languages of DNA and protein. If you are interested in the details, just look in any basic biology textbook, and you will find that the language of DNA ismade up of words. Each of these words is given an arbitrary meaning by a codebookcalled the “Genetic Code.” Proteins are also “written” using letters in a chemicalalphabet called amino acids. There are 20 different amino acids just as there are 26different letters in the English alphabet. Different arrangements of these letters inproteins spell out protein words, which are given an arbitrary meaning or function by thecell that makes them. Just as in any other symbolic language, there is no inherentmeaning for a given protein outside of the how the cell defines it. For example, theprotein called “insulin” is a signal to some cells in the human body to uptake sugar (glucose) from the blood stream. The insulin protein (Bovine Insulin) is made up of twoprotein words that are linked together. One of these words is 21 letters (amino acids) inlength. The other word is 30 letters in length.
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There is nothing special about thesewords in and of themselves that tells a cell that it needs to uptake sugar. So, how doesthe cell “know” what to do when it comes in contact with insulin? The cell recognizesinsulin. But how does the cell recognize insulin? The cell has a specific receptor protein that senses insulin like a lock recognizes a key. Then, just like when a key turnsa lock, this insulin receptor sends a signal to the cell that tells it to uptake sugar. Inother words, this lock is linked to an underlying system of function. The key that it
 
recognizes is the insulin key, but this recognition is arbitrary. The same function could infact be set up to recognize any other protein “word” or “words.” The fact that itrecognizes insulin is strictly arbitrary, just as in any other symbolic language. Theinsulin molecule is simply a symbolic representation of an idea or a function that the cellrecognizes. The cell recognizes insulin because it is programmed to recognize thelanguage of the body or “system” that it is a part of. Specialized cells make the insulinprotein as a symbolic message to other cells in the body that tell them when and howthey need to use the blood sugar that is available to the body. They could just as easilyhave been programmed to use some other protein molecule or “word” for the samepurpose. The fact that living creatures use symbols to send messages and to performfunctions is undeniable. The fact that these messages are arbitrary and dependentupon a pre-established code of definition also seems intuitive.The question now is, how did these arbitrary languages and words of living thingscome about? For the English language, and all other known languages, the ideas comefirst, and then the symbolic expressions of the ideas (since the symbols themselveshave no inherent meaning). The letters, “cat” mean nothing aside from the attachedidea that is arbitrarily given them by the English dictionary (or the English speaking“environment”). Likewise, the letters in the insulin molecule mean nothing outside of theattached meaning given to them by a living cell or system in a particular environment.Do words change their meaning through an evolution of random letter changes, or through an evolution of ideas, which then seeks out some symbolic representation? If Ichange the letters “cat” to read “hat”, does this change necessitate an evolution of recognition or function in and of itself? Obviously not because if the change read “cct”
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